Could someone help an old guy that's just beginning photo editing? I loaded Gimp 2.8 onto my Windows 10 computer for the purpose of restoring some old family photos. Before I loaded it I watched a number of tutorials on You Tube and it seemed pretty straightforward especially to do the type of repairs I need to do (remove tears, creases, blotches and etc using the clone tool and/or heal tool. After downloading Gimp and putting it in single screen mode I opened a photo that has a couple of tears and some writing on it to repair the tears and remove the writing. Before I tried any repairs I saved the picture to my desktop as a Gimp Project and then closed the original file and opened the project file. After selecting an area to work on, I clicked on the clone tool and tried using it to remove some of the writing. I first selected an area to clone using CTRL click and then clicked on some of the writing. Nothing happened! I tried it several times even closing and reopening the project but still nothing. I switched to the heal tool, repeated the procedure and still nothing. Any thoughts or suggestions?

First guess. The clone tools use whatever brush is active, so the first thing to check is that.

If the brush is set as clipboard it will be empty and clone can not use it, or if the brush is set to a very small size, clone might work but you might not see any result especially if the image is large.

Try something like this, the first of the fuzzy brushes is good for cloning. Set the size to a value where you can see the brush outline. Ctrl-click to fix the source, click and move to clone.

Other than that if you can make a screenshot of the gimp windows it might help.

First guess. The clone tools use whatever brush is active, so the first thing to check is that.

If the brush is set as clipboard it will be empty and clone can not use it, or if the brush is set to a very small size, clone might work but you might not see any result especially if the image is large.

Try something like this, the first of the fuzzy brushes is good for cloning. Set the size to a value where you can see the brush outline. Ctrl-click to fix the source, click and move to clone.

Other than that if you can make a screenshot of the gimp windows it might help.